


Dissonance

by Hyacinthium



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Gen, Interpretation vs Reimagining, LGBTQ Themes, Pre-Canon, Pre-Game Personalities (New Dangan Ronpa V3), Self-Hatred, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-26 05:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16675804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyacinthium/pseuds/Hyacinthium
Summary: The fun thing about a video game is that you can often create whatever kind of characters you want. Customized to hell and back, total control in your hands, change a click away. It's freeing. Bending and shifting. Want to change halfway? Just grab a mod or use a cheat! Character creators that are robust get encouraged.For all that to create a future where VR games can theoretically let a person play as anything is expected.Most people don't actually try. But it's normal to try and laugh later. Average. Acceptable.Unless you don't laugh later.





	Dissonance

**Author's Note:**

> This fic intentionally goes against the most common form of certain fic in this fandom. That is the approach to writing trans fic. This is a fic where Akamatsu Kaede is a transman. Not a female. Pre anything. Constantly misgendering himself. Full of dysphoria. Transphobia from a transgender person, etc. Because as much as we like to act as if that never happens, it does. 
> 
> I intentionally am not tagging this as trans fic for the same reason I didn't initially tag Saiou Week fics as having trans Kokichi. Tags function as both advertisement and warnings. I do not like either of those in relation to lgbtq characters.
> 
> The only reason I'm writing extended note is because this whole fic will almost certainly make transgender people uncomfortable or outright set up for a punch of dysphoria to the organs. 
> 
> I will answer questions in comments. Take care of yourself and be mindful. Watch Contrapoints.

It's not that she's strange or abnormal. She just wants to give it a try, have a laugh, and not actually do it again. That's how most non-superficial changes to your virtual body appear to go. Common knowledge and why so many games have strong restrictions. Hair color and length, eyes, and even facial structure or more- that's all fine to a point. A few inches won't do much. Extra cup size or weight loss, well just what woman wouldn't want that? 

Joking explanations from smiling people in lab coats. Yet Dangan Ronpa remains a very different kind of game. For all the warnings there isn't a single person stopping them from switching sex. It's even encouraged. Different people have different tolerance for it, they say. A smiling technician that helps strap her in even says that it can be fun. The second tech says that everyone is supposed to do it by the end anyway. 

Team Dangan Ronpa needs them to try out as many things as they want and can. For the perfect designs for the perfect characters. 

Everyone going in separate. 

Everyone leaving separate. 

Not a single character set in stone. 

So it's not that she's strange or abnormal for trying. She's talked to plenty of people about how fun it would be to switch for a day. Being curious is normal for normal people. 

It's not her leaving the locker and looking down at sturdy hands that is abnormal. It's not the feeling of pants and short hair that is odd. Big feet in male styled shoes aren't weird. The sound of a man's voice is heard everyday. Generating into a virtual world, stepping out of the spawn point, and gazing down; there's nothing wrong with the young blonde man. 

What's wrong is that Akamatsu Kaede gets a rush of pure relief the moment she comprehends that her body is truly male. Eve just the millimeters of bones and inches of height, the removal of useless twin weights, and then-

Kaede is sure that she's going to be using the in game avatar change function. She definitely will, and she tells herself this as she leaves the classroom. All these hallways full of foliage and rigid steel will soon see the original and correct design. The actual face of the Ultimate Pianist. Long eyelashes and long blonde hair and a short skirt to show off womanly legs. Yes, because of course, Kaede is a girl. 

That is what she tells herself as the two hour long session continues. It is not what she tells anyone else. Not once can the words leave her mouth. She laughs and chuckles as everyone introduces themselves, pretending to be an agreeable person even when the girl in the martial arts outfit starts swooning over the two petite girls of their group. At every and any moment to confess… 

When the guy with the weird hair grins at her and doesn't even mention the fact that she speaks so politely, calls her dude and bro, she relaxes and swallows down emotion. They talk about the killing games and what they plan on doing. All of them are one another's future targets. Future comrades and victims. Prey and predator with the spotless in between. That one girl with the silver hair over one eye too. She continues smiling softly as she picks at her skeleton hoodie even as Kaede slips and slides around with effeminate mannerisms. Watches with something like knowing, an introduction so soft and quiet that Kaede barely realizes that only the first name has been offered. 

Still, no one calls out Kaede as anything. There is nothing wrong with the blonde piano boy to her future ‘classmates’. He's simply a polite and somewhat feminine in social aspects. 

‘He’ is normal and seemingly well liked. 

Not that it's too strange for a guy to be that way. People see it on TV and such all the time. Stuff in the middle can be popular. It's common on Dangan Ronpa too. Kaede watches her fellow contestants and wonders how many are really girls or really guys. 

She wonders why her own thoughts make her want to slap herself despite how much everything already burns inside. 

The truth is that she knows, and the truth is that she wishes she didn't get a single shit. The same way she watches videos or looks at the news and snorts, because no. Kaede is normal. 

Kaede is a respectable female human being. She's just not into gender roles. She just doesn't like overly feminine things. She just doesn't like having a large and bothersome bust. Her culture and society places disgruntling things into the scope of ‘female’. 

A technician welcomes her back and calls her Miss when it's her turn to long out. The memory of one purple eye gazing at her drifts around. 

“It would be nice to not leave, huh?” Kaede slowly repeats. 

She exits her private room and ends up walking behind a short boy with just barely purple tinted black hair. His classical black school uniform is boring. Kaede wonders whose kid he is, because he wears a very different visitors badge than her. 

The boy glances at her with a smile that infuriates her. At first the anger is outlandish and confusing. Then, slowly as they both linger in a mostly unused lobby, Kaede understands. He sees her and must of course acknowledge her as a girl. No one would ever see her and not think ‘female’. Kaede isn't a boy. She sits down in a comfortably uncomfortable loveseat and stares at her hands. 

Eventually, the nameless employee's son or intern stretches as someone tells them to go home. 

Leaving the building in separate directions at separate times, Kaede barely holds back the sheer hatred and skin crawling urge to just rip off her breasts and scream. Everything is wrong, everything is empty, too full, too much, not enough and each person that looks is seeing her. Her as her, the girl, the girl clutching at a bag and dying from the feeling of underwire holding her breasts close enough to make cleavage and an attractive shape. Plenty of women want breast reductions. So many women just hate their boobs. Bits and chunks of flesh.

The problem is that the dull distaste and thoughts of reduction are exploding. Erupting even, out of control as it spreads to every other inch. 

Bits. Bits and bobs and chunks that probably always felt this way. Always are this way, and Kaede can only admit it now that she's been kicked from any form of defense. Her eggshell protection is gone from just two hours of existing differently. 

Kaede rides the train home with her face flushed, throat full of engorged threat responses, packed in like an object. 

She smiles with watery eyes at her mother passed out at on the living room couch. Behind her is a freshly locked door and in front a life. Each day with heels still on, home from work a so exhausted that she crumbles after struggling to make a meal. That's what it must mean to be a good mother. To never take a day off even if you're so sick you want to die. To never take time off when your husband does die.

To struggle and suffer for an ungrateful daughter. 

“I love you,” Kaede murmurs as she walks over. Her dainty and delicate hands twitch when seen, but she swallows the raging itch of dissonance and grabs the blanket- haphazardly made. The third of which remains in her own bedroom, a joint project between mother and daughters. The girl shudders and tucks her mother in. 

Her sister will not be home tonight. She never is. Not anymore. 

All that comes next is more dreary slog until Kaede gets to go again. That second appointment and second session in Dangan Ronpa V3. She'll go as a woman. She's going to. Because she is. 

Kaede trudges upstairs and peeks inside of her sister's bedroom. She remembers exactly where that little trove of childishly stolen boy's toys should be. Under a dusty bed, the toys taken by her much braver sister by stupid boys not deserving of things like nice red race cars. Just moments away from her sister's beloved unicorns and dolphins, Precure, her room a wonderful thing of peach and mint. It's nice to look at and remember. Like the snip of long hair using stolen scissors or the campaigns for shorts, or theft of already matching dresses. 

Envisioning it as her own makes Kaede repulsed. 

It was nice to have someone so thoroughly caring of you that they would exclaim happily a childish solution; that one sister would craft herself the most girlish of girls so that no one would care. To steal each bit of feminine for herself, saying it with a grin, so that Kaede could be not that. Because for the two of them at least there was no reason to care. 

No people saying what all originates from and turns into ‘just be a girl’. 

Not an inch of the shame and doubt that peaks into knowing you can't possibly say it. Can't possibly ask for more from someone slowly committing suicide for you. 

In that smile there was no hint of tragedy, because only hope existed that girl identical to Akamatsu Kaede. 

Because ‘I don't want that’ and ‘I never wanted these’ doesn't get smiles like that anymore. Because Kaede has learned that other humans are disgusting and unrelenting monsters. For each small exception there are hordes more of those that confirm it. 

The person that nearly wept in a simulated world removes school mandated skirt and blouse. A tight but comfortable sports bra is slowly put on. 'Less there', not weird at all, perfectly normal and respectable. In the safety of a dull color scheme and near a desk displaying a photocopied consent form, a waiver, and a paper that signs off on the allowance of a permanently real death; a boy pins up his long blonde hair and cries himself to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find similar things in actual fiction too. Like Ranma. 
> 
> A boy becomes a pretty girl and realizes how much better that is. Like magic, the characters get to live happier after struggling with themselves. Like a dream. Funny how nice that would be- instant wish fulfillment unless they really do decide to go back. Then it's fair and still nice.
> 
> In this future, where reality blurs for the sake of entertainment, to bend and shift sex or gender relayed stuff should be fine. Because it's fun to try before the bone deep revulsion sets in. There are of course limits for the sake of your comfort too. Catching the rising levels of certain negative feelings and informing the user to turn back or log out.
> 
> And if that never happens then they're never told to change. 
> 
> Remember, just how you must tell yourself each time, it's 'only strange if you allow yourself to desperately need it'. 
> 
> Hey, Akamatsu... Don't you think that just because you can't stand the truth?


End file.
